Friday, January 29, 2010

The core of the issue confronting us all is summed upin the headline a few days ago on a Press articleexamining the policy options open to the Government:

ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENT

There we have it. A perfectly normal proposition, itseems, based on the idea that ‘economic’ gains mightcome at a cost to the ‘environment,’ and that theremust be tradeoffs between the two. But there is no two.There is only one. The economy is the environment isthe economy. To say ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENTis like saying WORK VS LABOUR or POPULATION VSPEOPLE. It enables 'the environment'—actually, the airwe breathe, the ground we walk on, the world we live in,everything that sustains life—to be consigned to a sortof manipulable category like the price of milk or therate of unemployment. We will begin to make realhuman progress the day that enough of us perceive that ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENT is a meaningless statement,and that continuing to give it credence is possibly thesingle greatest impediment to the betterment of theplanet we inhabit.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Someone who gets a big mention in Kennedy Warne’s article on Manapouri is Alan Mark, the Otago Universitybotanist whose assessment of the environmental effectsof raising the lake ‘revealed just how delicately poised thelake-shore vegetation was, and that the consequences ofinterfering were “a great deal more far-reaching andunforeseen than the Ministry of Works engineerssuggested”.’ Forty years on, Mark continues to resistwhat might be called economic overreach; just this monthhe has been in the news for expressing astonishment andrevulsion at the idea, floated by energy minister GerryBrownlee, that Department of Conservation land shouldbe opened up to exploitation of its mineral resources.Mark told the Otago Daily Times that he had written toprime minister John Key warning him that, though NewZealand was seen as a leader in the way it handled manyenvironmental and conservation issues, that image wasfast being eroded by proposals such as this one. 'We'reway back and losing ground fast,’ said Mark. ‘You couldalmost despair.’ You could indeed—but we won’t, will we—especially so long as Brownlee keeps bulldozing ideasinto the public arena. His latest is a highway throughFiordland from Haast to Hollyford Valley, a road that, inthe view of Forest & Bird, ‘would drive a dagger throughthe wilderness of southern South Westland.’ SaysBrownlee: ‘I'm personally supportive of it but it's notsomething that the Government is actually considering atthe present time.’ For which read: it’s very much on theagenda. Between Brownlee and transport minister StevenJoyce, with the backing of Key and finance minister BillEnglish, this government would happily pave paradiseand put up a parking lot.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

For an illuminating insight into the perils of industrial‘progress’ I warmly recommend Kennedy Warne’sarticle on Manapouri in New Zealand Geographic(November/December 2009: the first few paragraphsare here). It’s a masterly summary of the fight in thelate 1960s and early 70s to save Lake Manapouri frombeing raised for a hydro-electric power scheme—a fightthat, in effect, gave birth to the modern conservationmovement in New Zealand. It begins thus—

On March 5, 1959, Charles Turner, engineer-in-chief of the Ministry of Works, addressed theSouthland Progress League in Invercargill. Thecountry’s prosperity, he told the meeting, was‘balanced on too narrow a base.’ The time wasripe for ‘exporting our rainfall in some otherform than meat or wool.’

—and goes on to tell us that Turner believed it would bea ‘crime against humanity’ not to exploit the lake’senergy potential. ‘I cannot support the philosophy,’Warne quotes him as saying, ‘that the natural beautiesaccessible to the few should necessarily be preservedto the detriment of the many.’

The few and the many: yes. How exactly do you definethose groups again? Turner, it seems, didn’t bother;nor did the Labour and National governments of theday, which unconditionally supported the idea ofraising the lake. Only a long and dedicated publiccampaign was able to overturn the decision and savethe lake in the teeth of all the usual arguments aboutincreasing economic prosperity etc (‘economic’ beingdefined in exclusively monetary terms, of course).Warne has dug out a delicious quote: as late as 1971prime minister Keith Holyoake was telling the people,‘If you do not know why we do a certain thing, justrely on our judgment.’

In these 14 pages of New Zealand Geographic you willfind the whole history of the Manapouri debateconcisely and memorably retold. But it’s not just auseful source of information (the Southland ProgressLeague!): from first word to final full stop it’s abeautifully composed piece of journalism, in which thehistorical research is seamlessly interwoven with freshinterviews and the writer’s own personal impressionsof a recent trip to the area. Having written hundreds ofmagazine features myself, I think I know anoutstanding example of the craft when I see it—and thisis one. Kennedy Warne, these days a freelance, was thefounding editor of New Zealand Geographic: there’s ahandsome tribute to him from current editor JamesFrankham at the back of this same issue. It closes withsomething that still inspires Warne—the words on themotto of an old newspaper he once came across:

For the cause that lacks assistance,For the wrong that needs resistance,For the future in the distanceAnd the good that we can do.

You could do worse than pin that to your wall, alongwith this, from Ogden Nash:Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A very good point is made here by the Labour MP StuartNash. He simply makes a connection of the kind peopledon't always readily make, even though it may be staringus in the face. Nash points out that

(a) Not six months ago Social Development MinisterPaula Bennett released the income details of two solomothers after they publicly criticized the Government’sdecision to scrap the training incentive allowance forwelfare beneficiaries;

(b) and now we hear that the IRD reckons 300property investors have dodged paying millions intaxes by juggling their accounts—one is believed tohave not disclosed $8 million of profits. (Nash doesn'tsay this but it seems some millionaire propertyinvestors cook the books so cleverly that their officialincome has been reduced to a point where they qualifyfor Working for Families payments.)

So how come, Nash wonders, the tax dodgers aren'tnamed and shamed by a government minister too?Because as things stand, you may say, it hasn't beenproved that they broke the law. But then, neither hadthe two solo mothers...

At this point it seems appropriate to quote SherlockHolmes, who said: 'It is my belief, Watson, founded uponmy experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in Londondo not present a more dreadful record of sin than does thesmiling and beautiful countryside.'

For 'lowest and vilest alleys in London' substitute 'thepoor and the powerless,' and for 'smiling and beautifulcountryside' substitute 'the world of big money and menin suits,' and there you have it. Elementary, my d.w.

Monday, January 25, 2010

How John Key’s government responds to the[tax] working group’s recommendations isshaping as its biggest test.—Dominion Post 22.1.10

Maybe. But I think the Government’s response to theMackenzie Basin intensive dairying proposal is going to bea more crucial one. Interestingly, there are signs that it willput a stop to the idea, which, if implemented, would marka significant turning point in New Zealand agriculture. Thelatter, for all its faults, and for all its propensity fordumping artificial fertilizer on the land and vast quantitiesof shit in the water, is still by industrialized-worldstandards relatively benign. Already, as I’ve written, we’veseen the infiltration of US-style feedlots for fattening cattle,but only on a tiny scale. If the Mackenzie Basin proposalgets the go-ahead, it’ll be all on for indoor farming on aEuropean scale, with thousands of cows being kept incubicles for up to eight months of the year. Several cows arealready on record as saying: thanks, but no thanks. This hasnothing to do with agriculture in its true sense andeverything to do with profit maximization regardless of thecost to beast or man.

So there’s that; and even other farmers are uneasy about it,something Agriculture Minister David Carter publiclyacknowledges—a definite sign that the Government itself ispreparing the ground to block the plan. Even it knows notto get offside with farmers. But there’s also the potentialdespoliation of what one media outlet calls the ‘famouslyarid’ basin, one of New Zealand’s iconic landscapes. That'swhy the companies behind this proposal thought it such agood idea, of course: the land, in their eyes, is 'arid' orempty, vacant, unproductive, and therefore useless foranything else. It's the Kiwi version of shopping at arids.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Marilyn Waring twitched aside the economists’ curtainyears ago: her 1988 book Counting for Nothing wasprobably the first book anywhere, ever, to bring togetherin one place all the tricks of the economics trade andexpose them as inadequate at best, false at worst. It wasparticularly strong on how women’s work is invisibilizedby the bean-counters—how, in the big statistical picture,they count for nothing. At the time, Waring says now, she believed that the ‘way ahead was to use economics tofight economics, through various estimating, inputtingand trading mechanisms.’ In other words, she thoughtthat it was just a matter of counting differently.

The above quote comes from a letter to the Listener of16 January 2010 in which Waring goes on to write (andI'll quote the next bit verbatim, because she nails the whole issue precisely, and in any case I don’t think Listener letters are available online):

By the time of the book’s second edition in 1999,I saw that this was an equally destructive path.How would we value the Chatham Islands robin,tuatara, wahi tapu, aiga (extended family)?Would only the items that had marketablecharacteristics, or replaced industrial processes,be those that found their way into the equation?All the estimating of values did not make iteasier to exercise judgment across a range ofvariables: it just abstracted the new phenomenato a market figure, rendering it meaningless foran informed debate about the integralcharacteristics of each piece of a complexenvironment.

In short, she concludes, ‘economics is not the answerto the evil that economics has wrought.’ In this letter,Waring does not say what she thinks the answer is,but one is readily to hand: in an illuminating chapter ofSmall Is Beautiful, published in 1973, E F Schumacherwrites about how matters of economic performance and growth have become the ‘abiding interest, if not theobsession, of all modern societies’ and observes, likeWaring, that ‘if economic thinking pervades the wholeof society, even simple non-economic values like beauty,health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be“economic”.’ The answer? Meta-economics, which,Schumacher writes, recognizes the existence of ‘goods’that never appear on the market—eg, air, water soil,‘in fact the whole framework of living nature’—andalso of people as they really live their lives, not just as producers and consumers of manufacturedcommodities. Not for nothing is Schumacher’s booksubtitled A Study of Economics As If People Mattered.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

You've got to love the good folk at National Business Review, whose first issue for 2010 should be requiredreading for students of homo economicus, a doomedspecies that once ruled the Earth but that now, like thewoolly mammoth, can only stumble blindly forward inthe wrong direction, incapable of fresh thinking andbarely cognisant of its surroundings. Connoisseurs ofthe absurd will love the biggest headline in the issue(2010 A MAKE-OR-BREAK YEAR FOR THE ECONOMY),and if you need to practise your eye-rolling, try this:

New Zealand's first-world status is at risk unlessthe government makes major policy changes toimprove economic performance, say the nation'sbusiness leaders.

Well, they would, wouldn't they. You could write a small book unpacking the coded assumptions in thatsentence—start with 'risk' and 'improve' beforegetting stuck into the whole baggage train of'economic performance' and 'first-world status.' Howoften has this kind of drum been beaten in order toscare governments into enacting policies that, by aremarkable coincidence, benefit business companiesand big investors at the expense of the rest of us?Remember the Wizard of Oz and make like Toto. Thecurtain is there to be torn down.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Progress is learning from your mistakes. Progress isdiscovering the art of going nowhere. Progress is gettinggetting along, and across, and through, and back.Progress is growing up; and down. All these are validforms of progress, but the dominant, the hegemonicconcept of progress in our time is materialistic progressmeasured by economic statistics and technologicaldevelopments. We are so in thrall to it that we don’teven notice our enslavement most of the time. Perhapsbecause we prefer to see our own lives in terms of ajourney towards something better or more successful weneed to believe that the society around us is, or ought tobe, going upward, onward, forward. This was not anissue in, say, medieval times, when life was experiencedessentially as stasis, with the real action coming afterdeath; it is probably precisely in reaction to that attitudethat Western peoples, anyway, for the past three or fourcenturies have been captivated by the idea of gettingsomewhere in this life rather than the next one. Darwinprobably has a lot to answer for, too.

What inspires politicians, excites the media and bringsbusinesspeople, investors and bankers to orgasmic pitchare reports of increases (good) rather than decreases(bad) or no change at all (boring). Yet I don’t think itwould be such a huge mental shift if we adjusted to theidea of the ‘steady state,’ as currently advocated here.Events will force us to, anyway, sooner or later. What irks‘gloomy Green Malthusian millennialists’ like me (I owethis epithet to Sanctuary, in a recent comment on a blogof mine; thanks, Sancs) is the sheer stupid waste, andharm, of pretending that economies can go on growingindefinitely, that crucial resources will never run out, thatthe environmental damage done since the IndustrialRevolution, and still being done on an ever-increasingscale, won’t somehow have to be paid for—and not just inliving standards but in lives, let alone anything else.

Each one of us could make a start by refusing to fall forthe conjuring tricks of modern economics, which,purporting to measure the world’s wealth and health,underpins the policies and actions of all governmentsand all international institutions such as the IMF and theOECD. Yet it does it in such a narrow cramped way, andso entirely in the interests of unfettered global capitalism,that it has come to be ahuman, if not downright anti-human. The first step towards economic sanity, andindeed a reclaiming of ‘economy’ in its true originalsense, is to expose this nonsense. I have used the imageof the king’s new clothes before; perhaps an even apterone is the Wizard of Oz. With his hocus-pocus he heldhis land in thrall; his magic seemed terrifyingly real.Thanks to Toto, we now know that he was just a funnylittle man hiding behind a curtain and cranking up thevolume. How scary was that?

Thursday, January 21, 2010

A charming error in this morning’s Dominion Post, in itscoverage of a report by a tax working group:

Finance Minister Bill English said some of theinformation dug up by the group on how high-income earners were dodging tax was startling.That only half of New Zealand’s wealthiestindividuals were able to avoid paying the toprate of tax would be ‘astounding to the layman,’he said.

Only half? Sure is astounding. All of us ‘laymen’ havebeen convinced for years that the whole lot of themat the top of the money heap have been practising taxavoidance.

An error of my own, to correct, though: the Clark Labourgovernment didn't appoint Jim Bolger ambassador to theUnited States—its predecessor, the Shipley Nationalgovernment, did. But Labour did make Bolger chairmanof Kiwibank and KiwiRail.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Writing about Mike Moore yesterday, I had no idea that,as I hear today on the news, he was about to be appointedNew Zealand’s next ambassador to the United States.Well, good on him. I’m pleased that a long career ofpublic service will be rounded off with a posting thatensures he won’t slip into the ignominy of being just onemore semi-retired member of the commentariat,condemned to write opinion pieces for the popular press,chipping in from the commentary box like the legion offormer All Blacks and test cricketers now behind themicrophone.

Ironically, when I interviewed him for the Clark book inNovember 2008, he was somewhat in the wilderness,having been passed over for appointments by the Clarkgovernment (he wasn’t even invited to the party’s 90thanniversary bash, which, rightly, rankled). I asked himif there had been offers at all from Labour and hereplied: ‘I don’t want anything. It would be nice to beasked, but who wants to be an ambassador waiting at theairport for Ruth Dyson? I mean, gimme a break.’

I guess waiting at the airport for Gerry Brownlee won’t bequite as humiliating.

Anyway, the National-led government deserves credit forgiving a job like this to someone who has spent much ofhis life attacking National. Clearly, it’s a quid pro quo forthe Labour government giving Jim Bolger the same job,so fair enough. It does rather tend to reinforce theoutrageous notion I put forward in my last blog—thatNational and Labour are more or less the same party now—but what the hey. I wonder if, after she leavesParliament, the powers-that-be will find a way in whichJeanette Fitzsimons can represent New Zealand too?

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Greens must now want the red meat ofCabinet power. Even they must be tired ofcondemning earthquakes in distant lands,eating tofu and raffling hemp jumpers.Lifestyle politics is fun, but to save theworld they may have to accept the pay rise.They have a strong brand and only need 5%.—Mike Moore, Otago Daily Times 11.1.10

Condemning earthquakes in distant lands? Mike Moorestill clearly hasn’t lost the ability to say things that don’tmake sense, or to wheel out stereotypes long past theiruse-by date; and he does bang on about ‘Kiwi battlers’and the virtues of so-called free trade a mite obsessively.But he has an acute political eye, a great line in ironicself-deprecation and an unbounded love of NewZealand and its ways—for these reasons I’ll always cuthim a bit of slack as a politician. He was desperatelyunlucky to inherit the poisoned chalice of the Labourleadership and the prime-ministership that went with itin 1990 when Geoffrey Palmer went belly-up. He had totake it—he had no choice—and he made Labour’ssubsequent election rout less worse than it would havebeen with Palmer still at the helm; but had fortune beenkinder to him, I think that, with all his flaws, he wouldhave made a good (and extremely entertaining) primeminister for at least a couple of terms. I was alsoimpressed that he agreed to be interviewed by me formy book on Helen Clark, given that he scarcely owedher any favours, and even more impressed when he bentover backwards (not always successfully) to be generousabout her. And he continues to write lively, provocativeopinion pieces, invariably with a memorable line or twoto savour (one I can’t get out of my head from a columnthe other day is ‘Paula Bennett is the Susan Boyle ofNew Zealand politics’).

Leaving aside the tofu and the hemp jumpers (??), Mooreis right to draw attention to the Green Party's politicalsituation and the hard choices it faces. Where the Greensgo from here is in fact one of the most critical questions inNew Zealand politics. In theory, they have the potential(one might almost say the destiny) to be one of thecountry’s two major parties, the standard-bearer for ared-green alliance of parties, movements and leanings,displacing Labour, which sadly has run its course butwhich—as is the way of these things—may sputter onobstructively for years. Yet after 10 years in Parliamentand a consistent percentage of the popular vote thatought to have given it a piece of governmental powerby now—a couple of cabinet seats at least—the GreenParty remains pretty much on the sidelines, a respectedvoice saying the right things and making a lot of sensebut condemned, it seems, to the role of carping criticwhile National and Labour borrow or steal and (usually)bastardize its best policies.

A brutal realist—Mike Moore, perhaps—would probablysay, well, like it or not, no one likes the Greens that much.If they did, the party would get more votes. QED. This istrue. But by the same token, no one likes National orLabour that much either; they just happen to be whatwe've become used to as the least uncomfortable politicaloptions. And just as civilizations don't last forever, nor dopolitical parties. With National and Labour looking moreand more like 20th-century (and early 20th-century atthat) parties incapable of coping with the realities of the21st century, the door is open, probably for the first timesince the 1930s, for a major new political movement tosurge forward. It can only come from the left, becausebetween them National and Labour represent the rightand the centre-right (and will foreseeably coalesce atsome point in the next 20 years). The Greens, as Mooresays, have a strong brand—as strong as 'Labour' was in itsheyday. They need to take that brand (if we must useconsumerspeak) into the marketplace more aggressivelyand risk getting their hands dirty with compromise andcoalition. They are never going to be handed power on aplatter—even one with tofu on it.

Monday, January 18, 2010

The article by Catherine Harris quoted in my last blogalso touches on the trend towards the aggregation offarms, which are becoming bigger and bigger: theaverage dairy farm, apparently, now carries twice thenumber of cows it used to. In that regard, there is aremarkable statement by former Landcorp director LexHenry, who is quoted as saying that he believes NewZealand is simply returning to its roots as ‘one bigcorporate farm’ before its big estates were broken up forreturning soldiers. ‘All we're doing,’ says Henry, ‘isrepeating history.’

Hallo? You mean the good old days when farming wasdominated by giant sheep-stations and cattle runsowned by a wealthy squirearchy, the very system thatthe Liberal government broke up as long ago as the1890s so that ordinary New Zealanders might get to owna piece of the country and farm it in a more modest way?Well, yes, he does. That’s clearly what he wants. Henryspeaks with the same voice as those frustrated by theco-operative structure of Fonterra that they regard as anantiquated obstacle to the greater glory of global capital.

Let’s not kid ourselves that farming as we have known itin New Zealand over the past 100 years has been somerural romance—the clink of the milk-cans, the click of theshears—unsoiled by grubby commercialism. No, the landhas been industrialized, near as dammit, and agriculturemade over into something resembling an assembly line.But I’d take that model any day over Henry’s one, whichwould amount to factory farming on a nationwide scale.

‘In our time,’ wrote E F Schumacher 35 years ago,

the main danger to the soil, and therewith not onlyto agriculture but to civilization as a whole, stemsfrom the townsman’s determination to apply toagriculture the principles of industry.

Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, makes a passionateand, to me, convincing case for a nobler concept ofagriculture that keeps humankind ‘in real touch withliving nature.’ Go the way of industrialization anddepersonalization of agriculture, he says, ‘and the widerhuman habitat, far from being humanized and ennobledby man’s agricultural activities, becomes standardized todreariness or even degraded to ugliness.’

This is the fundamental reason, besides many other morelocal and immediate ones, why the proposal for intensivedairying operations in the Mackenzie Basin (16 new farms,18,000 cows housed part of the year in cubicles) should befiercely resisted. We still have some semblance of genuinecontact with the land and nature here; factory farming onthe scale proposed would make a mockery of ‘beautifulNew Zealand’ and ‘clean and green’ and ‘100% pure’ andall the other mantras we love to chant.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

If there's any lesson to be drawn from history, it's thatthe powerful will go after what they can get when theyhaven't got what they think they need. And they willtake it. Already yet. Korea's Daewoo Corporation hasleased half the arable land in Madagascar.

Any idle notion that manifestations of the abovephenomenon, about which I wrote a few days ago, willbe confined to 'developing' countries should bedispelled by a feature article in yesterday's DominionPost about the expansion of corporate farming in NewZealand and the growing appetite of foreign investorsfor a piece of it. Writer Catherine Harris quotes ChrisKelly, chief executive of the country's largest corporatefarming business, Landcorp, as saying that 'security ofsupply of food' is an emerging geopolitical factor today,and that Middle East countries in particular aresuddenly realizing that their populations are expandingbut their agricultural land is not—and they need morefood from somewhere. Singaporean, Japanese andRussian companies are all listed in Harris's article ashaving stakes in aspects of New Zealand agriculturalproduction.

On top of that, the Chinese company Bright Food hasexpressed an interest in buying the sugar-cane assets ofthe Australian firm CSR, which owns 75% of the NZSugar Company, manufacturer of the Chelsea brand. TheChinese are of course only doing what European andAmerican imperialist enterprises have done for centuriesbut they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.Whatever they do is ultimately for the benefit of Chineseinvestors, producers and consumers. As competition forthe world's food (and water) resources heats up, NewZealand may find that it has as little power to resist suchdepredations as any 'developing' country does.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

This is the year, says Prime Minister John Key, back fromholidaying in Hawaii, when the Government starts‘delivering on the faster growth agenda that we want.’And in an article published under his name in the New Zealand Herald on 4 January, Finance Minister BillEnglish talks up the case for economic growth, declaringthat the Government has identified ‘six key areas aspotential drivers of growth’ and concluding that, as NewZealand ‘emerges from the recession,’ the challenge nowis to ‘get the economy growing again at a stronger rate.’

Yes. One could hardly ask for a better illustration ofprogressolatry, or worship at the altar of materialist goalspredicated on ever greater exploitation of the Earth’sresources and an unshakeable faith in the capacity ofthose resources to ‘grow,’ apparently without end. Asprevious blogs have sought to show, what we humanshave extracted from fossil fuels has grown just about asmuch as it can—it can only shrink from here on. Andfossil-fuel energy is so central to the kind of society wehave built that, without it, we face—to put it at its politest—a radical readjustment of expectations. No sign of thatin Key's or English’s outlook. English’s article, publishedbarely two weeks after Copenhagen, makes not a singlemention of global warming, peak oil, fossil-fuel depletion,the full ecological cost of the Western way of living. Itseems to have been written inside a sealed cocoon with asupposedly impermeable shell. As if the Government’sbest thinking was: if we keep our heads down andconcentrate on going from A to B and then to C and,whoopee, maybe even D, we won’t have to worry aboutthe fact that the whole fucking alphabet is collapsing.

One can understand this mindset and sympathize with itto a certain extent. Key and English’s kind of thinking isthe same kind of thinking that has (apparently) made NewZealand prosperous and secure, compared with manycountries. It’s worked before, you can hear them saying,so why change it? Especially given that we’ve ‘emergedfrom the recession' in (apparently) good shape. Let me sayonly this for the moment. Countries like New Zealandaren’t prosperous and secure despite other countries beinghungry and poor and conflict-ravaged. Countries like NewZealand are prosperous and secure because other countriesaren’t. No mention of that in Bill’s article either.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Peak oil is not just about running out of petrol for ourcars; far from it. This from The Omnivore’s Dilemmaby Michael Pollan:

Industrial agriculture has supplanted a completereliance on the sun for our calories withsomething new under the sun: a food chain thatdraws much of its energy from fossil fuelsinstead… Petroleum is one of the most importantingredients in the production of modern meat.

In his devastating analysis of the American beefindustry, Pollan stands in a Kansas feedlot—the kindof place where they fatten cattle on corn, and cornonly—and concludes:

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow:industrialize the miracle of nature that is aruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the lastthing we need: another fossil fuel machine.

An economist told Pollan that to raise a typical steerto slaughterhouse weight takes about a barrel of oil—and millions of steers are processed that way everyyear. You have to factor in the diesel fuel involved intransportation, the petrochemicals in pesticides andfertilizers for the corn, the power for the feedlots etc.

We’re not at that level in New Zealand, but there arefeedlots here—from memory, there's a big one downAshburton way—and growing pressure for theequivalent in dairying. At the very moment in historywhen we should be de-industrializing the land and thetreatment of the animals on it, the insane capitalistdrive for MORE, BIGGER, FASTER is pushing us in theother direction. This drive is so reliant on fossil-fuelenergy that it scarcely seems credible that the bigindustrializers can’t perceive the folly of carrying onthis way. Even on their own terms, it's a recipe fordisaster. As with the major-party politicians, however,they are utterly the creatures of the master-myth of‘progress’—so shackled to it that, to them, it’s ‘freedom’(hence their fantasies of the ‘free market’). All of us incountries like New Zealand are prisoners of it too, thiswriter as much as anyone. Anyone for an escape bid?I believe we could yet build a glider in the attic.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Curiously, Avatar may be a conscious expression of thesubconscious yearning for a new story that may bebehind the outbursts of rage and frustration referred to inmy last blog; hence, possibly, its box-office success. Butalas, it’s a truly appalling movie. I agree with Peter Calderand indeed Karl du Fresne about its utter inanity andinternal inconsistency even by its own standards; and Ifind Judy Callingham’s enthusiasm for it inexplicable.She acknowledges that it’s formulaic but loves it all thesame. Well, yes, sometimes formula does the trick, like agood detective story or an airport thriller. But $300 million(at least) of formula? Come on. (Not to mention the $30mtax break kindly donated to the cost of production by theNew Zealand taxpayer.) Above all, it’s a titanic failure ofthe imagination. I think James Cameron’s Terminatorfilms are great fun, terrific action movies, but it seems heused up all the imagination he had on them, and had noneleft for Titanic, let alone Avatar. Yes, there is somesignificance in the fact that the greenies are the goodies, asit were, but that’s not exactly new either—think Danceswith Wolves for a start—and in any case the idea is barelydeveloped before being discarded almost contemptuously.

[spoiler alert]

The supposedly unspoiled tribe of beautiful people at onewith nature triumph in the end because why? They’re waybetter at (as Calder says) ‘blowing shit up.’ Brute force winsthe day again, and the last frame shows the greens on topwith guns in their hands. Meet the new boss—same as theold boss. Imagine that.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

And Karl du Fresne wonders why people are so angry thesedays: why such unprovoked or out-of-proportion rage. Hecannot account for it. J M Greer (see my previous threeblogs) has an idea or two about it, though. Noting, also, the‘extraordinary level of anger that surges through Americathese days,’ this erudite and clear-headed writer suggeststhat what really angers us is the ‘fact that our preferredstory doesn’t fit the universe everywhere and always, andthose who disagree with us simply remind us of thatuncomfortable fact.’ And it’s unlikely to be a coincidence,Greer says, that this anger has intensified ‘over a quarter ofa century when the grand narratives of both majorAmerican political parties failed the test of reality.’

The same remark can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to NewZealand’s major political parties too. Neither is capable ofaddressing what’s really happening now, let alone tacklingit. As oceans rise and oil recedes, they can only offer baublesand beads from the same old economic bag of tricks. If Imay quote Greer again (I will get off him eventually),‘Despite occasional bursts of lip service, every majorpolitical party in every major nation in the industrial worldsupports economic policies that effectively subsidizeincreases in fossil fuel use, and thus move the world furtheraway from a transition to sustainability with every passingday.'

As they say, you're never going to solve problems with thesame thinking that got you into them; but it’s not so muchthat the major parties won’t change their ways—they can’t.They are the creatures of a narrative—a very powerful andconvincing one for a long while—that is now past its use-bydate. The new narrative currently being written by a millionanonymous authors has yet to take fully realized form, andmay in fact take decades if not centuries to do so. For themoment, I agree with former Christchurch mayor GarryMoore, who, asked by the Press on New Year’s Day for histhoughts on the year ahead, said: ‘Ordinary people will tireof waiting for clay-footed politicians to lead onenvironmental matters.’

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Again I wake up, and again I look at my world, the worldthat has nurtured me very nicely thank you since 1946,and again it seems impossible to think of this society,this civilization in terms of 'decline' or 'descent.'Everything seems to be geared to go-forward.Materialism rules the Earth, and even if we in the Westhave lost a little impetus, good old China is taking up theslack, boasting as proudly as the most diehard capitalistof its output, its growth, the fact that it's now the world'sbiggest exporter, biggest car market (13.6 million saleslast year). Meanwhile, this just in: the number of lions inthe world is estimated to be no more than about 20,000,compared with 450,000 50 years ago (hat-tip: the latestNational Geographic). If that raises your eyebrows, trythese stats. Total number of cheetahs: 7500. Totalnumber of tigers: 4000. In the world. So many; I had notthought death had undone so many. But what a foolishromantic I am; next thing, I'll be going all gooey abouthuman survival. The main thing to remember is that God,as it says in Genesis, having made man in his own likeness(nice touch), gave 'us' dominion over the fish of the sea,and the fowl of the air, and over all the earth, and licensedus to pretty much fuck it over. And look how far we'vecome on that licence; only a gloomy old ageing-baby-boomer-doomster would moan about the damage done.Life outside our windows and on our TV screens keepsrolling along like nothing could ever go seriously wrong.Which is what the Romans thought, too (minus the TVscreens), about 200 AD. Within 200 years they were toast.

For a moment, let's wrench our gaze off the (relatively)prosperous present and picture a couple of possiblescenarios. One is that oil supplies begin to get so tight thatthe price rockets up: either you pay double or triple whatyou pay for it now and start going short in other areas ofyour life or you use the car less and less and start catchingthe bus or the train. What buses? What trains? Oops,sorry, the governments of the previous 80 years have laiddown miles and miles of road for fast car traffic butneglected the infrastructure of public transport. What now?

Or: global warming starts wiping out islands, cities, low-lying nations. Millions of refugees look for somewheresafer to live. Where do these people go? And what kindof pressure will they put on the societies where they landup, welcome or not? As for resource competition (water,food, oil, minerals etc), if there's any lesson to be drawnfrom history, it's that the powerful will go after what theycan get when they haven't got what they think they need.And they will take it. Already, yet. Korea’s DaewooCorporation has leased half the arable land in Madagascar.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Reading back what I wrote yesterday I can see howfantastical it must seem: the idea that our civilization,so solid, so expansive, so apparently unstoppable, isin decline and even headed for collapse. I find it hardto believe myself when I look at the props on our stage:the cars, the roads, the global wheels of commerce, thesheer amount of plastic everywhere. To stand up andsay that it can’t go on like this is like saying the king hasno clothes. Yet say it and see it we must, if we are not togo on believing, as John Michael Greer says, that historyconsists of a ‘linear ascent from primeval pond scum tothe American suburban middle class,’ and that the best,indeed the only course of action is to join ‘our political,economic, and religious leaders [in] following the pathof least resistance toward a head-on collision withecological reality.’ Essentially, he concludes, the crisisis not an economic or even ecological but a religiousone; since the Enlightenment we in the West anywayhave worshipped at the one true church of materialprogress and sacrificed to the god of growth. Time, hesays, to start telling ourselves a new story, because thewind is whistling through the holes in the old one.

I want also to say that ‘descent’ and ‘decline’ arerelative terms and not necessarily doom-laden ordisastrous. We have made such a mess of things on thisplanet that a great deal of further unnecessary sufferingis inevitable, as post-peak-oil societies start to struggle,but many good constructive things will happen as newways of living emerge from the ruins of the old (orshould that be ‘older ways of living re-emerge fromunder the impress of the newer’). Some of these arehappening already. As Giovanni says in his comment onmy previous blog, 'if we have to ditch cars and reinventour cities around other modes and philosophies ofmovement transportation,’ then bring it on. The day thelast shopping megacentre closes its doors for want ofcustomers no longer able to drive will not, I think, besuch a bad day.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

In his book The Long Descent (A User’s Guide to the Endof the Industrial Age), John Michael Greer makes the pointagain and again that the age of cheap, abundant fossil-fuelenergy is over, and that we in the richer countries, at least,had better get used to it. People take ‘progress’ for granted,he says, but it’s time—way past time—to wake up andrealize that the bounty off which we have lived for the pasttwo or three centuries, especially the underground oilreservoirs created by millennia of decomposing organicmatter, will never be there again in such quantities and,ultimately, won’t be there at all.

So what? you may say: ingenious Man, who has unlockedthe secrets of nature, who has brought us the marvellouscomforts of civilization, who has created the motorwayand the megalopolis, the laser beam and the Laz-y-Boy,clever Man, all-conquering Man, who has, in the words ofDerek Mahon, ‘tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge/andgrasped the principle of the watering-can’—this species ofours will surely come up with other ingenious ways ofkeeping the show on the road and those of us in the luckycountries, anyway, secure in the lifestyle to which we’vebecome accustomed? Why, even as we speak (you maysay), electric cars are being developed, new sources ofenergy tapped. Build that road! Buy that car! All will bewell, because, well, it just will.

Greer will have none of that. Everything we take forgranted today as the essence of industrializedcivilization, he says, is based on a once-and-once-onlyoil bonanza that can never be replicated. Nothing—repeat, nothing—comes even close as a substitute. Oil’snet energy ratio is something like 200 to 1, ie, for everyunit of energy it takes to generate usable oil you get 200more, whereas a solar cell, say, has a ratio of 10 to 1 at themost optimistic. That's precisely why we exploited it sogreedily. And don’t think that nuclear power might yetsave the day, whatever the waste problems: uraniumresources are severely depleted too. In any case, to tapand develop alternative energy sources has—up to nowanyway—required a great deal of machinery powered by,but you knew this, fossil fuels.

In short, as the oil runs out, our way of living is going tohave to change dramatically. Greer emphasizes at greatlength that this doesn’t mean we’ll revert to primitivismand go back to living in caves, because the history of allprevious civilizations is that they don’t vanish overnightbut go into a steady, sometimes centuries-long decline(hence ‘The Long Descent’) punctuated, even, byupsurges. But it does mean a tremendous readjustmentof expectations and indeed actions now, because, baby,your nice little Western ways are simply not sustainable.Maybe in your lifetime, yes, but you wouldn't want tokeep partying at your children and grandchildren'sexpense, and leave them to pick up all those poppedballoons—would you? Of course you wouldn't.

Greer's book, essentially, is a sustained attempt to helpus in the early 21st century get over the ‘conviction thatour civilization is exempt from the slow trajectories ofrise and fall that defined all of human history before theindustrial revolution.’ Unfortunately, as he says, ‘Wehave lived so long in a dream of perpetual economicand technological expansion that most peoplenowadays take progress for granted as the inevitableshape of the future.’

One could go on. I won’t. This all the world knows well—it was spelled out comprehensively nearly 40 years ago inthe Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth—yet none knowswell to shun the apparent heaven that leads men to thishell. ‘Oil,’ says Greer, ‘provides 40% of all energy used byhuman beings on Earth, and it powers nearly alltransportation in the industrial world.’ And we are now atthe historical moment of peak oil: there will never be asmuch of it again. Your task for 2010: go figure.